Background/Aims

Quality of life is achieved through the repetition of everyday activities in one’s life. The Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, has called “small but certain happiness” (SCH) in daily life, such as drinking a crisp, cold beer after a strenuous workout, “Sho-Kak-ko”. In this study, as a preliminary attempt at research on SCH, we investigate prototypes of SCH among Japanese people and clarify the nature of SCH.

Method

Survey 1

We asked 200 Japanese to enumerate SCH activities and collected a total of 600 SCH case studies. Based on the collection of cases, a list of 62 SCH instances was created.

Survey 2

The 600 Japanese participants were asked "How much small happiness do you feel?" and responded to each of the 62 SCH instances with a 6-point scale, which was used as their SCH score. The 600 were further divided into three groups (i.e., 200 each), and each group was asked to answer the following questions: indispensability (how unhappy they would be without it), and importance (how important it is in their daily lives), and frequency (how often they experience it).

Results

Six factors were identified from the factor analysis in Survey 2A: 1) contact with nature, 2) familiar relationships, 3) interaction with media (SNS, comics, blogs), 4) free time alone, 5) cooking creations, 6) drinking and smoking. Based on Survey 2B, we examined the relationship between the SCH score of each factor and the indispensability, importance, and frequency of the factor. Correlations for each were 0.87, 0.83, and 0.54.

Conclusion

As an initial attempt at SCH research, we identified prototypes of SCH in Japanese and examined their properties. On the day of the conference, we will report on the relationships between typical indicators of well-being studies such as life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, and a multidimensional index, PERMA, and the SCH scores identified here. For these, data collection has been completed and data are currently being analyzed.